Christian Wiman on the Anxiety of Interpretation and the Sanity of a Strange, Ancient Thing

Earlier this week, Christian Wiman’s much-anticipated My Bright Abyss: Meditation of a Modern Believer shipped, and although I’m only half way through the essays contained therein, I can’t get them out of my mind. I can already tell it’s going to be a volume I return to over and over again, if for no other reason than that, when it comes to people writing about such things in our context, his gift for words is simply unparalleled–or at least limited to the small cadre of folks who provided blurbs on the back cover (Marilynne Robinson and–you guessed it–Mary Karr). It is such a privilege that we get to host him here in Charlottesville on May 15th! We’ll try to get a formal review together before then (of those that have appeared thus far, The New Republic put up a pretty solid one, as did Books and Culture), but for now, here are a couple of stop-you-in-your-tracks quotes from a book that overflows with them. The first is from “Dear Oblivion” and the second two are from “Hive of Nerves”:

“Contemporary people whose lives are marked by a searching, scorching spiritual focus–whether it’s conflicted believers, God-haunted agnostics, or even the neo-atheists whose very avidity gives them away–tend to be obsessed with whether God exists. What Weil is saying is that this is not beside the point exactly, but a misdirection: God exists apart from our notions of what it means to exist, and there is a sense in which our most pressing existential question has to be outgrown before it can be answered.”

“Behind every urge to interpret is unease, anxiety. This can be a productive and necessary endeavor, whether it’s literary criticism or theology or even the entire dogmas and rituals of a religion (since all religion is, ultimately, an attempt to interpret God and numinous experience). Such effort deepens and complicates our initial response, even as it gives us an aperture through which to see our moments of mystery, crisis, and revelation more clearly—to give them “meanings,” to integrate them into our lives. The trouble comes when the effort to name and know an experience replaces the experience itself. Just as we seem to have grasped every level of meaning in a poem, the private and silent power that compelled us in the first place seems to drain right out of it. Just as we plant the flag of faith on a mountain of doctrine and dogma it has taken every ounce of our intellect to climb, our vision becomes a “view,” which is already clouding over, and is in any event cluttered with the trash of others who have fought their way to this same spot. Nowhere to go now but down.”

“Live long enough in secular culture, long enough to forget that it is secular culture, and at some point religious belief becomes preposterous to you. Atavistic. Laughable. I know this was true for me. Never mind that many of my favorite writers were quite obviously religious–Simone Weil, Marilynne Robinson, T.S. Eliot, George Herbert–or that I retained some intellectual respect for the “intellectual” side of Christianity…still, the idea of giving my inchoate feelings of faith some actual content, never mind the thought of attending a church, this seemed not only absurd to me but an obvious weakness. To be a Christian was to flinch from contingency and death, both of which were the defining realities of contemporary life. To be a Christian was death for art, which depends on an attitude of openness and unknowingness (never mind the irony of an imperative of openness and unknowningness). It took a radical disruption of my life to allow me to see the sanity and vitality of this strange, ancient thing. There was no bolt-from-the-blue revelation or conversion or any of that. My old ideas simply were not adequate for the extremes of joy and grief that I experienced, but when I looked at my life through the lens of Christianity–or, more specifically, through the lens of Christ, as much of Christianity seemed (and still seems) uselessly absurd to me–it made sense. The world made sense. This distance between culture and Christ seems like a modern phenomenon, but I think it’s probably always been the case. Even when Christianity is the default mode of a society, Christ is not. There is always some leap into what looks like absurdity, and there is always, for the one who makes that leap, some cost.”

Terry Eagleton: “This blasphemous ideology, summarized in the common American lie that you can do anything you set your mind to, fails to acknowledge the frailty and finitude of the human, which is where the Inquisitor knows better. Also unlike the Inquisitor, this boundless optimism fails to acknowledge what one might call the terrorism of the ideal. Ideals are essential, but like the “law” for St. Paul, they can do no more than show you where you went wrong, but they cannot reveal to you how to go right. This is why Paul calls the law cursed. Ideals have the stiff-necked implacability of the Freudian superego, a faculty which encourages us to aspire beyond our powers, fail miserably, and then lapse into self-loathing. Idealism is the accomplice of violence and despair, not an antidote to them. The neoconservative desire to drag a barbaric world into the light of civilization is on display at Guantanamo Bay.”

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WHAT: Mockingbird seeks to connect the Christian faith with the realities of everyday life in fresh and down-to-earth ways.

WHY: Are we called Mockingbird? The name was inspired by the mockingbird’s peculiar gift for mimicking the cries of other birds. In a similar way, we seek to repeat the message we have heard - God’s word of grace and forgiveness.

HOW: Via every medium available! At present this includes (but is not limited to) a daily weblog, semi-annual conferences, a quarterly print magazine, and an ongoing publications initiative.

WHO: At present, we employ two full-time staff, David Zahl and Ethan Richardson, and four part-time, Sarah Condon, CJ Green, Scott Jones and Bryan Jarrell. They are helped and supported by a large number of contributing volunteers and writers. Our board of directors is chaired by The Rev. Aaron Zimmerman.

WHERE: Our offices are located at Christ Episcopal Church in Charlottesville, VA.

WHEN: Mockingbird was incorporated in June 2007 and is currently in its ninth year of operation.

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